Extend Your Life: Peter Diamandis, MD On The Future of Health & Longevity Science

In this episode, Rich sits down with Peter Diamandis for a conversation about the science and philosophy of lifespan extension, education, AI, space exploration, and the importance of mindset. Named by Fortune as one of the “World’s 50 Greatest Leaders,” Peter is the founder and executive chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation and executive founder of Singularity University. He has degrees in molecular genetics and aerospace engineering from MIT and an M. D. from Harvard Medical School, and over the course of his career, has started over 20 companies in the areas of longevity, space travel, venture capitalism, and education. A multiple NYT bestseller, Peter’s latest book, which he co-authored with Tony Robbins, is entitled “Life Force”. To read more about Peter and to peruse the show notes, click here. You can also watch it all go down on YouTube. And as always, the podcast streams wild and free on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Enjoy! Peace + Plants, Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 1:05Peter Diamandis?

  Certain species of sea life, like the bowhead whale, a large mammal, can live for 200 years. And Greenland sharks can live 400, 500 years. Sea turtles, similar, multi-hundred-year lifespan. And so the question is, if they can live that long, why can't we? And I remember thinking, it's either gonna be a hardware problem or a software problem. And we're gonna have the tools to fix that. And I think we're on the precipice of that. One of the things I did was I built over the last year an AI engine that searches the global news: journals, tweets, magazines, newspapers, and it finds longevity and health tech breakthroughs. And at the end of the day,

• 1:48Peter Diamandis?

  I get this news that gives me tremendous hope. And I'm seeing what's going on in all of these different fields. And I have zero question about reaching longevity escape velocity.

• 2:13Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast. What is happening, people? It is I, Rich Roll, your humble host, with you here today to continue an ongoing conversation that has been transpiring on the podcast for some time around health span extension and the emerging science of longevity. And those conversations have been at the hands of past guests like David Sinclair, Sergey Young, and Matthew Walker. But at the center of the Venn diagram that unites these brilliant minds stands today's guest, Peter Diamandis. Named by Fortune as one of the world's 50 greatest leaders, Peter is best known as

• 2:58Rich Roll?

  the founder and executive chairman of the X Prize Foundation, as well as the executive founder of Singularity University. Peter has degrees in molecular genetics and aerospace engineering from MIT, as well as an MD from Harvard Medical School, and over the course of his career, has started over 20 companies in the areas of longevity, space, venture capital, and education. He's co-authored two New York Times bestselling books, Abundance and Bold, which are both optimistic sort of manifestos on how the exponential growth of technology actually bodes well for a positive future for all.

• 3:43Rich Roll?

  And we had a great conversation. It's coming right up in a couple few, but first. Okay, so Peter's got this new book out that he co-authored with Tony Robbins. It's called Life Force, which essentially documents all of these near and long-term technological breakthroughs in longevity science, as well as disease prevention and health span extension. And it provides, first, the basis for this conversation, along with a sort of corresponding discussion about the philosophical implications of life extension.

• 4:27Rich Roll?

  In addition, and because Peter has expertise and involvement in so many other interesting pursuits, We talk about the evolutionary implications of a self-aware artificial intelligence. We discuss the future of education, the importance of mindset in solving our biggest problems, also his pivotal role in the growth of privatized space exploration, and why he thinks bringing the woolly mammoth back to life is a good idea. I had a good time with Peter. We covered a lot of interesting ground and I enjoyed him very much. So here you go. This is me and Peter Diamandis. Peter, so nice to meet you. Thank you for doing this.

• 5:11Rich Roll?

  I've followed your work for quite some time. I'm excited to meet you and talk to you. There's so many threads that we can pull today, and I think just as an introductory note, the way that I think about you is as somebody who's made a name for himself, being somebody who's all about big, bold ideas, moonshot thinking, and how to kind of disrupt this disruptive approach to solving or approaching and solving the world's biggest problems and reimagining a better future for humanity. And you've got your tentacles and tons of stuff. I think today, we're going to focus on probably our shared favorite subject, which is health and extending health span.

• 5:51Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 5:51Rich Roll?

  Before we get into anything, though, I gotta know what's in your... You came here today with a big green smoothie.

• 5:57Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 5:58Rich Roll?

  You've got it in front of you there. I need to know what's in that.

• 6:00Peter Diamandis?

  Athletic green. So I do an intermittent fast every day, you know, through till about 2:00, 2:30, and I'll drink some Athletic Greens just to flavor the water and give me a little bit of extra benefit.

• 6:14Rich Roll?

  There you go. Big supporter of the podcast.

• 6:17Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 6:18Rich Roll?

  I'm a big fan of Athletic Greens. I had mine this morning as well, so good to know.

• 6:22Peter Diamandis?

  Cheers.

• 6:24Rich Roll?

  You've got this new book out, Life Force, that you co-authored with Tony Robbins. So I want to dig into healthcare, the future of healthcare. Health span, longevity and all of that. But I think to begin, it's probably worth just canvassing the current state of healthcare and how you think about it as a basis point for how we're going to disrupt this broken system and reimagine a better, newer one.

• 6:51Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, it's completely ridiculous. It's a system that deserves to die under its own weight. And just like Google disrupted libraries and like, when's the last time you went to a library and then provided ubiquitous access to information, we're going to see the same thing happen in healthcare. And it's really going to be not the existing healthcare companies that make the transition. It's going to be a flock of new ones. And those, the healthcare companies of the future may sound like Amazon and Google and Microsoft and others, Apple to add to the list. It's really going to be the convergence of these exponential technologies, convergence

• 7:30Peter Diamandis?

  of AI and sensor technologies and synthetic biology and quantum computing. You know, one of the things I'm clear about is this decade, we're going to see healthcare move out of the hospitals, out of the doctor's office, into your home, onto your body, right? And it's going to become, you know, what has historically been a reactive, generic system. I mean, it's, you know, the numbers as well as I do that, you know, when you have an FDA approved drug that you've been given to take, you think it's going to work for you. But it works for like 10 to 20% of the people it's prescribed for. It just may not be working with you, your physiology, your genomics, your microbiome

• 8:14Peter Diamandis?

  and so forth. And the potential is a completely personalized, completely preventative and predictive model where the recommendations I'm getting from the healthcare AI, my, you know, it's about making yourself the CEO of your own health. I think about that. I think about Jarvis from Iron Man, that AI that, that Iron Man has as really continuously measuring my biology from sensors I'm wearing that are implanted, that are in my bed or the chair, that's measuring exactly what's going on all the time and giving me recommendations. This is the future of healthcare. This is where we're going and it's a future of healthcare.

• 9:00Peter Diamandis?

  Which like Google is demonetized and democratized. It's going to be the best healthcare ever and it's going to be the lowest cost healthcare available to everybody.

• 9:11Rich Roll?

  The democratization aspect of it, though, only comes in time. As most of these things go, they begin very expensive in that early stage and that's sort of a hurdle that has to be addressed. But I mean, currently, when you look at our healthcare system, particularly in the United States, it's sort of sinking under the bloat of its bureaucratic morass and it's a situation in which we're dealing with human beings at the late stages of whatever's ailing them. You don't go to the doctor unless something's wrong, with the exception of the occasional check-in or whatever, which is fine, but we're dealing with all of these conditions once they have progressed and matured to a certain point and then it becomes a situation

• 9:56Rich Roll?

  in which the doctor is diagnosing and prescribing a medical intervention that oftentimes, at least pharmaceutically, is treating a symptom and not the underlying condition. And with the advent of these technologies, we're able... It seems to me a lot of this has to do with early detection.

• 10:13Peter Diamandis?

  100%.

• 10:14Rich Roll?

  At the very outset of these situations so that they can be addressed because once they've crossed a certain threshold and matured to a certain point, they become almost impossible to untangle or reverse.

• 10:26Peter Diamandis?

  Catch cancer at stage zero or stage one, you've got a 95% to 99% chance of a complete cure. Catch it at stage three or, God forbid, stage four, your chance of a cure is down to like 10%. And we're all developing cancers all the time. I think that's something that people don't understand. That is the normal course of what's going on in biology. But we have our immune systems that find the cancer and zap it before it gets uncontrollable. And it's when your immune system gets exhausted or your cancer has certain tricks to hide itself from your immune system that it can get out of control.

• 11:08Peter Diamandis?

  And yeah, it's about early diagnosis and one of the things I'd love to talk with you about, if not now, and a little bit later in our conversation, is the incredible progress in diagnostic technologies. I just went two days ago for my annual health upload and this is not like... You know, listen to your lungs and your heart and tap your knee and prostate exam. No, this is, I'm digitized. 150 gigabytes of data about me, right? Full body MRI, brain MRI, brain vasculature. An AI-enabled coronary CT. So we're using a platform called Clearly that is looking for soft plaque, not calcified plaque. If it's calcified, it's safe. It's not going to rupture. It's like, you know, cemented into the wall.

• 11:54Peter Diamandis?

  And if it's not, you know, occluding the coronary artery, that's fine. But if it's soft plaque that can rupture and block, that's where it's dangerous. And the old CTs don't find that. Clearly does. And so that I do every year. I did it, which is brand-new technology that we've got at Fountain Life. I did it a year ago and I had a really good score. Wasn't perfect. I put some interventions in place and it's, my cardiac status has significantly improved in a year, but I can measure that. And that, that gives me inspiration to keep going, right? Then we do, part of this upload is your genome, your microbiome, your full, you know, blood omics.

• 12:37Peter Diamandis?

  We do a Grail liquid biopsy test, right? Which is amazing.

• 12:41Rich Roll?

  What is that?

• 12:41Peter Diamandis?

  So Grail, a guy named Jeff Huber, who was a senior VP at Google, beautiful guy. His wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. It was probably stage three, might have been stage four, when it was too late. And she passed. And being the entrepreneur, he was, he said, there's got to be something better we can do. We've got to be able to find these cancers in the body. So he partnered with a group within Lumina, which is the major sequencing company out there, and developed what's called the liquid biopsy. And so when a cancer is growing someplace in your body, you don't know where it is,

• 13:19Peter Diamandis?

  it's dividing and cells rupture and the DNA from those cancer cells becomes accessible in your bloodstream. And so Grail is a blood test you take and it looks for 50 different cancer markers in your bloodstream. And depending on how old you are, because the frequency of cancer is increasing, it's a test you do today. I do it once a year. Eventually I'll do it every six months. Who knows, maybe even a quarter. It's relatively low cost compared to the expenses. And so if you detected cancer, you're then beginning to look and the full body MRI will show that to you as well. So, you know, for me, it's like a forest fire. When you

• 14:00Peter Diamandis?

  want to put the forest fire out at when it's, you know, at ignition or when it's a conflagration?

• 14:05Rich Roll?

  Right. So, right now, when we think about the sort of things that we should all be doing on a daily basis, there's a lot of low hanging fruit. It's like

• 14:14Peter Diamandis?

  A hundred percent.

• 14:14Rich Roll?

  You know, get

• 14:15Peter Diamandis?

  The basics.

• 14:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's

• 14:16Peter Diamandis?

  Stuff you talked about all the time.

• 14:18Rich Roll?

  Nutrition, exercise, reduce your stress, mindfulness practices, community, you know, sort of finding purpose in your life.

• 14:25Peter Diamandis?

  Mindset, yes.

• 14:26Rich Roll?

  These sorts of things. And then, you know, beyond that, we start to venture into this terrain that is, you know, in your bailiwick. And I've had, you know, some of your colleagues on the show, Matthew Walker, to talk about sleep. I've had David Sinclair on a couple times.

• 14:43Peter Diamandis?

  Both brilliant guys.

• 14:43Rich Roll?

  And we've gone down that rabbit hole of

• 14:45Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 14:45Rich Roll?

  The emerging science. And then Sergey Young, who, as you know, like, because you work with him, you know, his book just paints this, you know, wild picture of the future. We're at the very early stages of this where we're, you know, we're wearing, we're wearing Oura rings and

• 14:59Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 15:00Rich Roll?

  Whoop.

• 15:00Peter Diamandis?

  Apple Watches, yes.

• 15:01Rich Roll?

  Yeah, like all that kind of stuff. But this is just very, you know, nascent in terms of what's to come. So I want to get into some of these emerging technologies in a little bit more detail.

• 15:12Peter Diamandis?

  That's the fun part.

• 15:14Rich Roll?

  Why don't we, yeah, let's, and then I have some philosophical kind of thought experiment questions that I want to throw your way. But let's, let's talk about, you know, where we're at and what's to come with respect to things like genomics, AI, sensor tech, 3D printing and the like.

• 15:29Peter Diamandis?

  Sure, sure. I mean, let me just say that the basics are still critically important.

• 15:35Rich Roll?

  Sure. I mean, in the pyramid

• 15:36Peter Diamandis?

  Diet, sleep, exercise.

• 15:37Rich Roll?

  Of everything. Like, you're not going to get away with much if you're not taking care of those things, right?

• 15:42Peter Diamandis?

  A hundred percent. So, you know, I just, I feel a moral obligation to tell people a few basic things, which are the same things that you've talked about and written about in your career. Sleep is fundamental, right? Matt Walker, UC Berkeley, brilliant thinker here. He wrote a great book called Why We Sleep. I commend it amazingly. And if evolution could have gotten rid of a single hour of sleep, the advantage of a subpopulation of humans that slept seven hours versus eight hours is huge. It hasn't. We need eight hours of sleep. And, you know, I, I used to brag when I was in medical school about being good on five or five and a half hours.

• 16:25Peter Diamandis?

  Uh, now I'm bragging about hitting eight hours every night. And, you know, do that with a great eye mask with a, taking the temperature down to 64 degrees. Having a cooling mattress and really getting asleep at 9:30 and waking up at 5:30, just that consistency. And not watching TV. Uh, I actually put on an, you know, an audible book with a timer to go off in 15 minutes to get read a bedtime story. Um, on diet, uh, you know, again, fundamental. Um, for me, it's a whole plant diet. Uh, I do, I've gone vegan, I've gone keto. I'm back to sort of a whole plant with some Mediterranean sort of fish and, and eggs.

• 17:08Peter Diamandis?

  And then intermittent fasting, uh, for, you know, 18 hours and then eat for six.

• 17:14Rich Roll?

  You do that every day?

• 17:15Peter Diamandis?

  Every day. Yeah. Well, let me just say, I do cheat occasionally with the kids on a Saturday morning, uh, but I try not to. Uh, yeah. And, uh, it's interesting, right? When you are doing intermittent fasting, I have incredible amount of energy. And people would think, well, I need the food to fuel me and so forth. You know, when I eat food after I've been fasting, it just, it pulls the blood into your digestive system and I just, it makes you lethargic like on, on, you know, Thanksgiving Day. And then of course, exercise, fundamental. And again, you know more about that than I do, but I try and take almost every meeting I possibly can as a walking meeting.

• 17:57Peter Diamandis?

  Uh, or a walking phone call or a walking Zoom. So I try and get my 10,000 steps in a day. And then I do a heavy weight workout twice a week and light weights the other days.

• 18:07Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Well, you look great.

• 18:09Peter Diamandis?

  I feel great.

• 18:10Rich Roll?

  You're like, you're 60?

• 18:11Peter Diamandis?

  I'm 60. I feel like I'm, you know, I have a mental image of 28.

• 18:14Rich Roll?

  Uh huh. And there is that, I mean, David Sinclair talks about the, the difference between the biological clock and the kind of, uh, what does he call it?

• 18:22Peter Diamandis?

  Chronological and biological.

• 18:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So where are you on that scale?

• 18:25Peter Diamandis?

  So, yeah, David, uh, when we wrote, uh, the, our book Life Force, uh, you know, we say David Sinclair has two ages. He's chronologically 53 and his biological age was 33. It was like, holy cow, that's amazing. I'm 60 and 49 and a half.

• 18:39Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 18:39Peter Diamandis?

  Uh, and so I'm going to keep trying to get it down as, as far as I can.

• 18:44Rich Roll?

  And where are you at in terms of some of the Sinclair Protocol with the NMN and the Metformin and rapamycin and all of that kind of stuff? Because there's, it seems like there's some debate.

• 18:56Peter Diamandis?

  There's still controversy.

• 18:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah, there's an ongoing debate as to the veracity of all of that.

• 19:00Peter Diamandis?

  So I'm all in. Actually, no, probably a nine out of 10. I'm not, I'm not a toe in person. See, I jump and then figure out how to build a parachute. So where am I on that regard? I've got, I'm taking probably about 50 supplements a day.

• 19:17Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 19:18Peter Diamandis?

  I do a monogram of Metformin. Right? Metformin is a very cheap medicine. It is a medicine, you're prescribed for it, and it's also known by the name Glucophage. And it reduces access to glucose in the bloodstream, in the cells. It's thought to impact the mitochondria. It's one of the safest drugs out there. It appears there's a large study that Dr. Niraj Burjali at Einstein Medical School is working on right now, that Metformin, from the data he's looked, extends your life. It reduces the prevalence of cancer and has got very low impact. I'm then taking a number of other supplements from quercetin to turmeric to-

• 20:01Rich Roll?

  Antioxidants.

• 20:02Peter Diamandis?

  Oxac, exactly.

• 20:03Rich Roll?

  Anti-flamatories.

• 20:04Peter Diamandis?

  And I have, I'm supplementing my testosterone, right? I think that's a really important thing that people need to realize. Our bodies were never designed to live past age 30. You know, on the savannas of Africa 100,000 years ago, you know, you'd go into puberty at age 12 or 13, and you were pregnant by age 13 or 14. And then by the time you were 28, your kid was having a kid.

• 20:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah, grandparents in your 20s.

• 20:33Peter Diamandis?

  And, and the worst thing you could do to perpetuate the species was steal food from the mouths of your grandchildren. And so you would die. And you'd give your bits back to the environment. And so there was no selective pressure to keep you in homeostasis in your 40s, 50s or 60s because you had done your deed, you had reproduced already. And as a result, we go out of homeostasis. Our pituitary, our hormonal levels are all decreasing. And it is possible, and I think the right thing to do to bring your, to optimize your testosterone levels. You know, and the challenge is that different kinds of physicians have different sense of what's normal, right?

• 21:18Peter Diamandis?

  So you might not have your doctor suggest testosterone supplementation until your testosterone level is down below 200 or 150, where you probably want it to be in the 500 to 800 or 1,000 level to really have the vitalizing energy to build muscle, to have clarity of thought. So I, you know, take 0.2 mL's, you know, injection, sub Q, twice a week. And I've thought about rapamycin. I have not started on that. Fountain Life, which I mentioned, which does the, all the diagnostics, has a regenerative medicine side as well.

• 21:59Peter Diamandis?

  And we're working with the Buck Institute on trials and an investigational new drug around rapamycin, around stem cells, around dastinibcorsetin. These are the senolytic medicines out there. And there's a lot of data coming in. It's the early days still, but this decade is going to be magical.

• 22:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah. How long before you think we reach what you've talked about as achieving longevity escape velocity? Maybe like, describe what that is.

• 22:31Peter Diamandis?

  So today, science is having breakthroughs that are extending your life every year. And on the average, for every year you're alive, science extends your life for about a quarter of a year. There is a point, and Ray Kurzweil talks about it extensively. And Ray wrote the preface of our book. He's one of my mentors, one of the greatest thinkers on exponential technologies. He's my co-founder at Singularity University. And I asked him, when do you think we're going to reach longevity escape velocity? Which is the point that for every year you're alive, science is extending your life for greater than a year, right? Sort of departs your point.

• 23:12Peter Diamandis?

  And his answer about when we'll get there, he said is about 12 years. That's his guess. Now, if someone else said it, I wouldn't give it that much credence. But if you Google Ray Kurzweil's accuracy on his predictions, it's like 86%. I mean, the guy is extraordinary in his predictions of the future. And then I was in a conversation with George Church, who I also write about extensively in the book. And I asked George, when do you think we're going to? You know, George is a professor of genomics at Harvard Medical School, same as David Sinclair. They're fantastic friends and collaborators. And George said, within the next 15 years.

• 23:57Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 23:58Peter Diamandis?

  And so I'm like, that's kind of insane, right?

• 24:02Rich Roll?

  Right. So assuming, let's assume for a moment that that's correct. 15 years from now, give or take, we'll be able to, every year that you live, there will be an incremental

• 24:14Peter Diamandis?

  Addition of your life's health span.

• 24:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah, sufficient enough such that the perpetuation of life would seem to never cease.

• 24:26Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, it's like, you know, we have a 24,000 mile diameter or circumference of the planet. And if you're in a jet going at 1,000 miles an hour westward, the sun never sets, right? And that's, if you go faster, the sun will rise.

• 24:43Rich Roll?

  You're in stasis.

• 24:44Peter Diamandis?

  And so it's somewhat similar in that regard. And it gets you thinking, which is, you know, to use a phrase from one of Ray's books, Fantastic Voyage, it's living long enough to live forever. Now, let's put aside the idea of living forever as a moment, but

• 25:04Peter Diamandis?

  How long can we live? When I was in medical school years ago, Rich, I remember watching a TV show on long-lived sea life. And I wasn't, you know, didn't have much time for TV. I would basically just watch Star Trek whenever I could, which was my sort of vitamin dosage. And what I learned was that certain species of sea life, like the bowhead whale, large mammal, can live for 200 years. And Greenland sharks can live 400, 500 years. You know, sea turtles, similar, multi-hundred-year lifespan. And so the question is, if they can live that long, why can't we?

• 25:43Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 25:43Peter Diamandis?

  And I remember thinking, it's either going to be a hardware problem or a software problem, and we're going to have the tools to fix that. And I think we're on the precipice of that.

• 25:53Rich Roll?

  And what, and from a philosophical point of view, like, that conjures up a conversation around the appropriateness of all of it, does it not?

• 26:04Peter Diamandis?

  Sure.

• 26:05Rich Roll?

  I mean, you're somebody who's always been very optimistic. You've written a couple of books where you kind of canvass these emerging technologies and you characterize them in very favorable terms. So you're not one to be prone to dystopian, you know, scenarios. But I can't help but think, like, in the event that, you know, perhaps we could live to something like 200 years, like, what would that mean? Like, how does that impact our psychology as a species? How does it impact how we think about risk? How does that impact overpopulation on a planet of, you know, decreasingly limited resources, et cetera? So how are you wrapping your head around all of that?

• 26:48Peter Diamandis?

  All right. Let's open this door. I love it. So, first of all, a study came out six months ago, out of, done by Lund School of Business, Oxford and Harvard, that looked at the impact of extending the lifespan by just one year of every human on the planet. The economic impact is $38 trillion, the global economy, of being able to keep you and me in the game a year longer. So it's a massive positive impact to the global economy, right? Earning potential, being productive. Now, the question about overpopulation, and I write about that in the chapter on exponential

• 27:31Peter Diamandis?

  tech and longevity, and a lot of people are concerned about overpopulation of planet Earth. Then there's a lot of people, including myself, Elon Musk, I had this conversation with him last April, that are concerned about massive underpopulation of planet Earth.

• 27:47Rich Roll?

  I have a hard time seeing that being

• 27:50Peter Diamandis?

  Well, let me give you the numbers. So 50 years ago, the average was 5.7 children per family globally. Today, that has dropped to 2.4 children per family globally. The replacement level is 2.1.

• 28:06Rich Roll?

  The idea being when you raise the floor on economic well-being and you increase access to education, the number of kids goes down.

• 28:16Peter Diamandis?

  Significantly. And so, the US is below the replacement level. Most of Europe is below the replacement level. Japan, China, below the replacement level. And the concern is that rather than going out with a bang, it's going to be a whimper, that we're going to peak, and we will peak, just like peak oil and peak natural gas and all those other scarcity mindset, we're going to peak at 9, 9.5 billion people, and then a very rapid decline. And the numbers post-COVID is that the reproduction rate has dropped precipitously post-COVID. So, you know, we talk about the great resignation and having difficulty finding people, which is true.

• 28:56Peter Diamandis?

  You know, I'm involved in a dozen companies and hiring people is getting harder and harder. I'm going to want to keep people in the game. And why do people stop working? Because they're in pain, or they're tired, they don't have the energy. And so, but if you can have the vitality, the aesthetics, the cognition, the mobility, at 100 years old that you had at 50 or 60, you know, it's amazing time to be alive.

• 29:28Rich Roll?

  I can't help but think if you could live to 200, the possibility certainly exists that you would have multiple partners across that period of time.

• 29:38Peter Diamandis?

  Sure.

• 29:39Rich Roll?

  You might have multiple families. Like I had a whole family with two kids with this person and now I'm gonna have two kids with... You could do that three or four times over.

• 29:47Peter Diamandis?

  And multiple careers, you know, three or four times over. You know, the reality is that our existence, our societal structure, our laws are built around a very different age. You know, we don't have a true democracy, but representative democracy because the communications didn't exist back, you know, hundreds of years ago to be able to count everybody's vote, but they do now. And, you know, the idea of social security was designed and developed when the average lifespan was like 55. You know, you would retire, go on social security, you know, 18 months later, you were dead.

• 30:28Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 30:29Peter Diamandis?

  And so, all of this is changing. And, you know, for the financial advisors listening to us or the people who are dependent upon financial advisors, making sure you have enough money, if you're gonna add 20 or 30 healthy years, is an important conversation to have and it's not being had sufficiently. Because I think this is the direction that we're heading.

• 30:57Rich Roll?

  It's also interesting to think about how we calibrate risk also, because if you're faced with the prospect of living that long, how do you think about like, oh, am I gonna play football in high school? Am I gonna go skydiving? Like, why would you incur any unnecessary risk that could threaten your ability to live for another century?

• 31:18Peter Diamandis?

  There's a great science fiction story called The Puppet Masters. I think it's by Larry Niven or David Bryn. And it's a society that has achieved longevity escape velocity. And they got to a point where they're so risk averse, they have no corners on their tables. They don't wanna like bump themselves. And, you know...

• 31:41Peter Diamandis?

  I think.

• 31:42Rich Roll?

  It's hard to anticipate what that psychological makeup would be because we haven't, we have no experience with something like that.

• 31:50Peter Diamandis?

  I think the single most important thing around the psychological makeup of longevity is having purpose long enough, you know, enough of having a bigger future for yourself than your past to keep you wanting to stay in the game, right? That keeps you excited for, you know, this is probably a great French term, you know, the vie de whatever, that keeps you excited about, like for me, Rich, as you know, my early passions in life were all space, right? It was the Apollo program, it was Star Trek, it was all of that stuff. And it's just now, and I worked for 20 plus years in the commercial space industry, it's

• 32:29Peter Diamandis?

  just now, through the work that mostly Elon's doing, and to some degree Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson and others, that we're opening the space frontier. I want to go and, and walk on the moon, start a city there, I want to go and mine the asteroids. I want to see that future, but unless I'm able to tack on an extra 30 healthy years of my life, it's going to be just out of reach.

• 32:55Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it is worth mentioning, you know, in, in talking about private spacecraft and everything that we're seeing going on right now, which is unbelievable, that it really all tracks back to your initial expiries, like everything that we're seeing in the private space with space exploration, I don't, would it have happened had you not created that initial expiries? I mean, maybe it would have, but it was really an inflection point for this whole thing.

• 33:24Peter Diamandis?

  Thank you. It was like, you know, when I grew up, my parents were both in the medical field. My dad, both born in the island of Lesbos, my dad came over, became an OB-GYN. My mom should have been a doctor, she managed the office for him, and it was always expected I'd become a doctor. That was it, you know, it was like, is like that old, that old joke around the president being inaugurated and his mom is there and, and the person goes, Mrs. so and so, aren't you, aren't you so proud of your son who's become the president? She goes, yes, but you see that guy next to him? That's his brother and he's a doctor, right? It was like, it was like that kind of a thing. And so, space captured my heart. And I wanted so desperately to become an astronaut.

• 34:08Peter Diamandis?

  And, um, and so I went to medical school as, you know, if I wasn't a fighter pilot, being, being a medical doctor was the next highest probability of getting an astronaut corps. And I got to meet lots of astronauts. I did research on them, befriended many of them, the Apollo astronauts, the shuttle astronauts. And what I learned really boggled my mind. First of all, uh, my chances of becoming an astronaut, like one in a thousand, right? I'm, I'm five, four and a half. I'll, I'll add the half there. And my chance of becoming an astronaut, I have a more of a chance of becoming NBA All-Star than I do, it's like, it's crazy. Half the astronauts selected in the corps have never flown. They're called penguins because they have wings and they don't fly.

• 34:50Peter Diamandis?

  And then if you do get to fly, on the average, at most, it's two flights during your career. And I'm like, that's just not my vision of going to space. I want to go like every weekend if I want to go. And so I made a wholesale shift to commercial space. And, um, really began focused on how do I open it up commercially? How do I build a business, you know, an exothermic economic reaction? Started something called International Space University, started a company I'm very fond of called Zero G. With Ray. Yeah, with Ray, Ray Cronice, myself and Bob and Byron Lichtenberg co-founded that, the three of us. And it took us 11 years to get approval from the FAA to do that.

• 35:34Peter Diamandis?

  But our, our highlight was flying Stephen Hawking into Zero G, the world's expert in gravity into weightlessness. It was amazing. I remember that. And then I was given a copy of The Spirit of St. Louis, Lindbergh's biography by a dear friend, Greg Marinac. And I'm reading this book and it chronicles, uh, something called the Orteg Prize. It was a $25,000 prize offered in 1919 for the first person to fly between New York and Paris. And it was considered craziness, the idea that you can fly that distance. And nine teams went after this $25,000 prize. Uh, four of them died in making the attempt. And Lindbergh, who was the most unlikely guy to do it, had been flying only for two years.

• 36:18Peter Diamandis?

  Um, no one would sell him an airplane or an engine because they were so scared that he would, you know, fail and give them a bad reputation. He makes the flight, 33 and a half hours, uh, from Roosevelt Field to Le Bourget. Uh, becomes the most famous humans on the planet. Aviation skyrockets. And it was cause of that prize. And I was like, that's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna create a prize. And so, uh, I announced the idea of a $10 million prize for the first team who could build a private spaceship, carry three adults up to 100 kilometers, land and do it again within two weeks. And, uh, lo and behold, we had 26 teams from seven countries. Um, a guy named Bert Rutan, who had built the Voyager airplane that flew nonstop around

• 37:02Peter Diamandis?

  the world, backed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, uh, built Spaceship One, uh, and claimed the prize in, uh, 2004. I think the legacy of that was, uh, one, we had to change all the regulations. Uh, and that was a big deal. Right. The regulations for commercial, private, human spaceflight did not exist. And we worked, uh, we said, listen, this prize is gonna be won in Russia or Argentina. And so we got the laws changed here. And then, most other countries copied as they do. The FAA is usually the leader here.

• 37:38Rich Roll?

  Was that part of why it took that many years? Or was it just the technological development?

• 37:42Peter Diamandis?

  No, it was the technology. It was also, it was the capital that was required. Uh, aggregating the capital to build these ships was, cause everybody said, listen, can anyone really pull it off? Why isn't NASA doing it? And aren't you gonna die trying? And so that just made it very risk averse for everybody. And, uh, as a result of that, um, it took eight years for the prize to get won. Uh, Branson came in, bought the rights from Virgin, uh, to create Virgin Galactic. And then I've known Jeff Bezos since college. I'd, my first group ever was a college space organization. I was running the MIT chapter. He's running the Princeton chapter.

• 38:18Rich Roll?

  Cause you, you had this double life through, uh, college and med school.

• 38:22Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I was, I was.

• 38:23Rich Roll?

  You know, in the space world, starting all these organizations.

• 38:26Peter Diamandis?

  And then going through medical school, trying to make my parents happy. I remember I met with, uh, Bezos in Seattle after, like, the year after he started Amazon. And I was like, so Jeff, what up with Amazon? I thought you wanted to do space. And he goes, well, I'm gonna make my money in, in Amazon, then I'll go spend it in space. Like a simple, you know, two-step plan.

• 38:42Rich Roll?

  Right. That clarity all the way back then.

• 38:44Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. And then, uh, and he and Elon, who I've known through since, uh, 2000.

• 38:52Peter Diamandis?

  I was trying to get Elon to fund the Ansari X Prize before I had the money and then the Ansari family funded it. But this idea that you can inspire small teams to do crazy things is huge. And bringing this back to health and longevity, working with David Sinclair and George Church, we're very, we've designed and developed and initially funded by Sergey Young, to give him credit. We've got an age reversal X Prize that we're very close to launching. And when Sergey first wanted to do a longevity prize, and I've been the biggest longevity, you know, fan and involved in this industry for a decade now, I was like, man, I just don't see how we're going to make an X Prize out of it.

• 39:36Peter Diamandis?

  And the more I started studying it, and you know, kudos to Sergey, I was like, oh, interesting. And it was, okay, we're not going to do a longevity prize, we're going to do an age reversal prize. And it's can we, and to win this prize, you need to demonstratably, through a number of very specific mechanisms, demonstrate the age reversal of three independent tissues or organ systems in the human by 20 years or more in a repeatable fashion.

• 40:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's a pretty high bar, especially when all of the, it seems like all of the science right now is in mice and rats and the like.

• 40:12Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, it is, you know, that work is going from mice and rats into dogs. And, you know, when I asked David and George, again, my two sort of superstars, and in the, in the book Life Force, we have these heroes, and David and George are definitive heroes in the book. I asked them, when do you think we're going to be seeing the gene therapies that were used to reverse the age in mice? The answer is, we'll likely see it being tested in humans in five years' time, which sounds insane.

• 40:55Rich Roll?

  Is that due, once again, to kind of regulatory hurdles? Or more about the progress of the science itself?

• 41:02Peter Diamandis?

  I think it's both. It's, you know, the FDA is a governor, like, limiting the speed by virtue of wanting to make sure it's done well and doing it safely. When I was in medical school and graduate school, I was in a lab, Richard Mulligan's lab, at the Whitehead Institute at MIT and Harvard. And it was the earliest days of gene therapy. And this incredibly brilliant man and vision of being able to use a virus, in this case,

• 41:42Peter Diamandis?

  an adenohazard virus, that you've stripped out the virus's DNA and put in the DNA that you want. And using this virus to go and infect the specific cells in the human body and inject this piece of programming into it was a massively brilliant idea. And unfortunately, when it was first tested, it killed the young patient. And it really set back the field like, you know, five to 10 years. I don't know the exact number. And then it was eventually successfully trialed in what's called bubble boy's disease, when you have no immune system. And it was successful.

• 42:26Peter Diamandis?

  And now it's an extraordinary tool in the toolkit. But you don't want to make that mistake. You don't want to have something set back the field. So there's caution in doing it in, you know, mice and rats and guinea pigs and dogs and primates and then eventually humans.

• 42:44Rich Roll?

  Well, there's certainly a qualitative difference between extending the life of cells, human cells, or, you know, decreasing the rate at which they decline. And it's another thing altogether to, you know, quote unquote, reverse their aging.

• 42:59Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 43:00Rich Roll?

  So how do you demarcate the difference between those two?

• 43:03Peter Diamandis?

  So here's the question. And it's one that when I first thought about it, and I'm not sure if I heard it posed or just my mind came up with it, which is... When we're born, we have 3.2 billion letters from our mother and 3.2 from our father. And those same, that same genome is there when we're 20 and 40 and 60 and 80 and 100. And the question is, if it's the same genome, and it is basically the same genome, why do you look different? What, why? And it turns out, it's not your genome, it's your epigenome. Epi from the Greek word for above. It's, it's the controls of which genes are turned on and which genes are turned off.

• 43:45Peter Diamandis?

  So as, as you well know, every cell in our body has the genes to become any other kind of cell in our body. Uh, and when we are, begin life, we are a pluripotent stem cell. Stemness means the ability to differentiate into, you know, bone, muscle, ligament, you know, whatever it might be. But once it's differentiated, that cell is only expressing the proteins for a muscle cell, or only expressing the proteins for a, a skin cell. The other proteins that are used in the eye, or the brain, or the liver are wrapped up,

• 44:26Peter Diamandis?

  um, and, and tightly bound in this, uh, system called our histones that, that limit it from being expressed. And so it's why your cells don't all of a sudden start becoming other types of cells. You don't want, you know, sort of your muscle becoming a skin cells. And that's your epigenome. And what David Sinclair does a beautiful job in his book, Lifespan, which I commend to everybody, in discussing that our epigenome, uh, changes over time. And you can measure your epigenome, looking at methylation patterns, the methyl groups

• 45:09Peter Diamandis?

  of CH3 attached to different parts of your DNA that control whether it can be read or not read, and whether it's wrapped tightly or not. And he then goes on to talk about what are, uh, a system called the sirtuin systems, right? Um, there are seven sirtuin genes and seven sirtuin, um, uh, proteins that are controlling...

• 45:32Peter Diamandis?

  Two different functions that are critical to your existence. One function that the sirtuins control is your epigenome. The sirtuins are controlling keeping your muscle cell a muscle cell, keeping your skin cell a skin cell. The other thing that sirtuins are controlling is DNA repair. So, just living life, you know, being hit by cosmic rays, by chemicals in the environment, by secondhand smoke, whatever it might be, we're constantly being hit by these mutagens that are causing double-strand breaks and single-strand breaks and other kinds of DNA damage. The number I just read the other day is a thousand to a million DNA hits per day per cell.

• 46:17Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, it's insane. But luckily, our cells have evolved these DNA repair mechanisms. And our sirtuins are overseeing that and supporting a DNA repair. And they're, as we get older, the DNA repair is getting more and more burdensome, and it's distracting the sirtuins from their other function of epigenetic regulation. But it's even worse than that because the fuel that sirtuins are using is something called NAD, right? And we can talk about NMN, which is a precursor. And as you age, your NAD levels in your cells plummet to under 50%, you know, again, in

• 47:01Peter Diamandis?

  our 40s, 50s, and 60s because our body was never designed to live that long. There was no homeostasis at that point. And so, the way I visualize it in my mind is your genome is like the keys of a piano. Your epigenome is the piano player. And if you're playing the right keys at the right time, you're expressing yourself properly. Now imagine that the piano player, at the same time they're playing the concerto, need to go and repair this thing over here. And the amount of time they're having to repair is they're being distracted over and over and more and more frequently. And then imagine that, you know, the food that they're being fed to energize them is getting less and less. They're becoming weaker and weaker and more and more distracted.

• 47:45Peter Diamandis?

  And so your epigenome gets dysregulated. And we then see, you know, skin changes, we see more cancer, we see a whole slew of different age-related situations.

• 47:58Rich Roll?

  Right. So the idea being that by ingesting this exogenous NAD precursor in the form of NMN, you're alleviating some of that burden.

• 48:09Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, you're giving your sirtuins. Yeah, you're giving your sirtuins more energy to fight their good fight.

• 48:16Rich Roll?

  Right. And how, what is the relationship between all of that and this conversation around declining telomere lengths and how that impacts our aging?

• 48:29Peter Diamandis?

  So I won't dive into areas that I'm not fully sure about, but I mean, telomeres are the end caps of our cells that, that get shorter and shorter as we age. So there's something called the Hayflick limit, which is your cells are able to replicate about 50 times. And then they do one of three things. After they've reached about 50 limitations, 50 replications, they should have the decency to die. Or if they don't, they could become cancer cells and the regulatory brakes are taken off and it can grow out of control. And the third thing that happens is they become senile cells, also called zombie cells.

• 49:11Peter Diamandis?

  And they just sit there and they produce inflammatory factors. And I think the number is like 3% of our cells in our body are senile cells in our skin, in our liver, in our lungs, in our kidneys. And so there's a whole new set of medications called senolytic medicines, which are looking to identify and zap those senile cells, kill them. And the reason for that is if you're able to do that, it, it reduces inflammation in the body, which is one of the, the big, you know. Cause of aging as well.

• 49:46Rich Roll?

  Right, that's in essence.

• 49:48Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 49:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, let's go back to the pluripotent cells, the stem cells. I think what you're doing with cellularity by capturing these cells in the form of, of the placenta.

• 50:03Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 50:04Rich Roll?

  Is pretty interesting.

• 50:05Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, it's fascinating. So, one of our partners in the book is Dr. Bob Hariri, who's my older brother from another mother. He's a pilot. He was a neurotrauma surgeon. And early in his career, when his wife was pregnant with his daughter Alex, Bob found something curious that, that normally when I was in medical school and he was in medical school, you're taught that the placenta is sort of the support mechanism for the fetus. And when he looked at his wife's echo, it was like, it was clear the placenta was huge compared to the fetus. And like, why, it was a support mechanism. It should be growing at the same time.

• 50:45Peter Diamandis?

  Long story short, uh, he was the first person to really recognize the placenta is the source of, I think of it as a 3D printer that manufactures the baby, generates all of the cells, all the stem cells. And, uh, when you have a baby, typically the labor and delivery will charge you to incinerate and get rid of the placenta. And he said, instead of doing that, we should be collecting this incredible organ and collecting from it, stem cells, exosomes, natural killer cells and T cells, each for a different reason. And, uh, he started doing this work as an entrepreneur, got bought by a company called Celgene,

• 51:26Peter Diamandis?

  which is now part of Bristol-Myers Squibb, but Celgene was a hundred, a hundred billion dollar company. And Bob was running cellular medicine at Celgene. About four or five years ago, I helped him spin what is now cellularity out of Celgene, take the whole cellular medicine division out. And we started this in Bob's chairman and CEO. And I'm very proud to be his vice chairman of the company. And what Cellularity does is a number of things. Number one, we're the largest bank of placentas on the planet. So when my wife and I had our two boys, we banked their placentas. There's a company called Life Bank USA, which is a division. Anybody listening who is pregnant

• 52:09Peter Diamandis?

  or knows someone who's pregnant, I think it's a moral imperative to save the placenta.

• 52:15Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's an insurance policy on your children's future.

• 52:19Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, it's like, you know, that's the, the placental cells are the, like, the original boot disk, the original software. And from that, you'll be able to have so many benefits of regrowing organs, or there's a whole series of cancer diseases where you're going to want to have access to that, to that original clean, you know, zero-day genome. So Bob realized this, and what Cellularity is doing is it's doing, it's mining the placenta for products. So, first thing is natural killer cells. And natural killer cells are

• 52:58Peter Diamandis?

  the part of your innate immune system that can detect cancer and zap it, can detect cells infected by viruses and zap them. And it turns out that in a mother who's pregnant, who has cancer, the probability of a cancer metastasizing to the child is like near zero. And it turns out that the natural killer cells from the placenta find any cancer cells and zap them. But when you're older as a human and you have immune exhaustion, which occurs, your immune system starts declining, you don't have the ability to detect the cancer. So what we do is we use the natural killer cells.

• 53:40Peter Diamandis?

  From the placenta intravenously against a number of cancers. We're now going into glioblastoma, which is that terrible fatal brain disease. And I can't discuss the results yet, but we're super excited about this. So natural killer cells and T cells from the placenta as a supercharged, very vital, youthful cancer mechanism. And then stem cells as the means to augment your stem cells. When you're born compared to age 80, your stem cell populations are down like 100-fold or 1,000-fold in different compartments. And your stem cells are the regenerative engine of the body.

• 54:22Peter Diamandis?

  You can think of the body as a mansion with an army of workers that support everything being right. But as you age, the workers become senile, they die, and the mansion starts falling apart. Same thing for stem cells in your body. So can you revitalize it? In fact, this book, Life Force, began.

• 54:42Rich Roll?

  Yeah, because Tony had this stenosis issue.

• 54:45Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, he was chasing a 22-year-old snowboarder and trying to keep up. And he takes a bad fall. Buddy broke his neck, had actually basically done a really bad rotator cuff. And all of the surgeons were like, you need surgery, you need surgery, you need surgery. And Tony is the guy that gets the fifth, sixth, and 10th opinion. And he reached out to me one day and said, what do you think? And I said, you should talk to Bob Horry about stem cells. And talking to Bob is like asking someone to give you advice on basketball and talking to LeBron James. It's like he's like the top of the game. And so Bob advises him where to go get stem cell treatments.

• 55:27Peter Diamandis?

  And after three days, one shot in the shoulder and three days of IVs just for 30 minutes a day. His pain is gone, his pain in his back is gone and, you know, a couple of months later, his MRI is normal and he's like, "This regenerative medicine stuff is amazing."

• 55:49Peter Diamandis?

  And, you know, results will vary and Tony is definitely a mind over matter kind of guy. So if it's gonna work for anybody, it'll work for him. And we began a journey. So I, as part of the X Prize, I run an adventure trip every year for our benefactors. And we were piggybacking at the Vatican and running a longevity adventure trip and I invited Tony to come and he came on this trip. In fact, we opened the book with that story. And he met all of these incredible physicians and researchers. You know, George Church was there, Martin Rothblatt, Multitude, and he, he goes all in. He studies. And so he said, "This is my next book."

• 56:31Peter Diamandis?

  He invited me to co-author it with him, which has been a joy. And that's how we got to where we are now.

• 56:37Rich Roll?

  And here we are, and you're doing podcasts.

• 56:39Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 56:41Rich Roll?

  Let's talk about some of the other interesting developments in this space. Where are we in terms of AI and machine learning and sensor tech and 3D printing? Like, how is that going to, like, at what point can we start to see that being introduced into our kind of diagnostic regimen?

• 57:01Peter Diamandis?

  So AI is here now. AI is out competing physicians almost everywhere in terms of diagnostics. So AI is diagnosing lung cancer, prostate cancer, Alzheimer's. You know, the idea that a human doctor, as good as we are at pattern recognition, can outdo an AI is getting less and less likely. In fact, I think it's going to become malpractice to diagnose somebody without AI in the loop very soon.

• 57:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah, when the data sets, you know, as they get larger and larger and larger.

• 57:34Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 57:34Rich Roll?

  The ability for an AI to detect something is gonna far exceed the human.

• 57:41Peter Diamandis?

  By a massive margin. And, you know, every hour of the day, there are probably dozens, if not hundreds, of journal articles written. And an AI can consume all of them, but no physician can keep up with the, the volume of accelerating, you know, exponentially growing research.

• 58:01Peter Diamandis?

  And so AI is here right now. There's another place it's being used. One of my companies, my venture fund, Bold's invested in is called Insilico Medicine. A brilliant Russian AI scientist, Alex Zveronkov, has built this out of Hong Kong, and it's using something called generative adversarial networks to design, which is a type of AI, machine learning, to design customized drugs for specific targets. But it's doing it like a hundredfold faster and a hundredfold lower cost. And the eventual, where this is eventually going to go in combining even quantum computing,

• 58:43Peter Diamandis?

  because quantum chemistry, looking at predicting how molecules are interacting with each other, is where I think quantum computing is going to have the biggest impact, is we're going to be able to simulate drugs for you, specifically for you, for the surface antigens on your cells, and create drugs N of one. And so there's just, you know, AI is, it's biotech, gene therapies, CRISPR, all of those areas, and AI, and then sensors. So today, we talked, we opened with this conversation that I think we're going to move healthcare out of the house, out of

• 59:25Peter Diamandis?

  the office, out of the hospital into the home, right? And you're going to be, have injected sensors subdermally, you're going to have sensors you've swallowed, sensors on your clothing, on your bed, on your hands, whatever it might be, in your toilet, that is measuring the parameters all the time, and passively, uploading it to your AI that is constantly, you know, you hop in your autonomous car, and your AI says, listen, I'm not taking you to the office, I'm taking, your office can be gone, but I'm not taking you to where you're going, we're going to this center, because I've detected small MRNAs in your bloodstream that indicates you've got an impending, you know, cardiac event.

• 1:00:07Rich Roll?

  You have this very optimistic perspective on AI. Your friend Elon doesn't necessarily share that optimism. I mean, it is, it's, I find myself, when you were describing that, I find myself equal parts fascinated, but also terrified of some kind of, you know, weaponized dystopian version of artificial intelligence. And how, you know, humanity isn't always so great about contemplating the unexpected, you know, downstream consequences of some of these technological advances.

• 1:00:44Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 1:00:45Rich Roll?

  That we're hell bent on. I mean, we're going to do it no matter what.

• 1:00:48Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, there's no on off switch. There's no volume switch.

• 1:00:50Rich Roll?

  But we're not very good about taking a beat and saying, what are we really doing here? And how can we enact measures now in this premature phase to prevent some of the predictable, you know, negative consequences?

• 1:01:03Peter Diamandis?

  We're actually better than you might think.

• 1:01:12Peter Diamandis?

  When I was in medical school, I remember recombinant DNA, the first restriction enzymes for being able to accurately cut DNA at different locations came in. And it was predicted to be this disastrous implications for terrorism and Hitler Youth and clone babies. And it was just like, you know, front covers of magazines were predicting doom and gloom. And what happened was that the science community got together at a place called Asilomar, up north of here. And they had the Asilomar conferences and they created their self regulatory structures to preventing these things from happening.

• 1:01:58Peter Diamandis?

  And we haven't had any issues in forty years. And the fact of the matter is, it's our brains are wired to give much more credence to negative news than positive news. Because as we were evolving on the savannas of Africa, you missed a piece of good news, like some food, too bad. You missed a piece of bad news, like a rustle in the leaves is a lion and not the wind. You're dead. You're dead. Your genes are out of the gene pool. And so, we have an ancient piece of our temporal lobe called the amygdala, that scans everything we see and everything we hear for negative news. And you're glued to it. And so, you know, I call CNN the crisis news network, or the constantly negative news network. I don't have a good, I don't have a good version for Fox. But, we're bombarded by all this negative news.

• 1:02:43Peter Diamandis?

  But, it hasn't actually, all, so, another thing that we do, is we see a potential piece of bad news out there, and we project it all the way to here. And we're like, we're screwed. Mm-hmm. But what we forget, is that we have increasing technologies that are giving us the resources to solve those problems. So the environmental disaster of the 1890s, do you know what it was? No. Massive environmental disaster. Horse shit in the streets? Yes, horse shit. Yeah, exactly right. We were, people were moving out of the rural area into the urban, downtown urban, they were bringing their emotive force, the horse, with them. And horse shit was piling up every place.

• 1:03:28Peter Diamandis?

  And they would, they redesigned the stoops to have little runways, so that when it rained, the shit would flow downhill, literally, but it was causing disease. And the predictions were disastrous. And, what happened? The car came in. And the car displaced the horses and got rid of that issue. But it created a bigger problem. Well, and we're gonna solve that bigger problem. And I truly believe we are, right? We're on the verge of fusion. If you've been tracking what's going on, it's pretty extraordinary. We're seeing, this year, we're going to create more photovoltaic electric capacity in the United States than any other form of, over half of the US electric, new electricity production is going to be photovoltaic. And we're seeing amazing progress on batteries.

• 1:04:13Peter Diamandis?

  And I just had incredible conversation with a team at a Google on zero-point energy, but I won't go there, it's another conversation.

• 1:04:20Rich Roll?

  Well, there was that news item the other day. I didn't, I didn't read past the headlines, but that nuclear fission machine that creates infinite energy? What was that, what is that about?

• 1:04:31Peter Diamandis?

  So I think that's, it's really the fusion work that's going on right now. So there's about, I would have never thunk this, but there's like a dozen VC-backed fusion companies. And, and this is harnessing the power of the sun, which creates no radioactive, radioactive waste, but is able to provide a massive abundance of energy. And so the prediction, and I talk about this in my books, that we're heading towards a squanderable abundance of energy. Right? And interestingly enough, we're, we're moving very rapidly in solar and, and solar and wind, incredible progress. The poorest countries in the world are the sunniest countries in the world.

• 1:05:12Peter Diamandis?

  And they may become net energy exporters, but, and then we may see fusion coming in and displacing all of that. So not, I'm not sure how we got onto this conversation, but...

• 1:05:24Rich Roll?

  Well, the idea of being optimistic about the future. I was sort of challenging you with a, you know, a dystopian counterpoint. But I think, yeah, it's, it's this Steven Pinker idea of, you know, life is actually a lot better than you think. And we have this tendency to look in the past and think that it was a lot rosier than it actually was.

• 1:05:43Peter Diamandis?

  We romanticize the past, and it was short and brutish, and you died at 40 from TB. Honestly, the poorest people amongst us today are living better than the kings and queens did. It just, we compare ourselves against our neighbors. And we compare ourselves against people we don't even know. And we forget, you know, it's like, we don't look at how far we've come, we look at sort of this... Potential perfection.

• 1:06:07Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:06:07Peter Diamandis?

  But it's amazing what we have access to.

• 1:06:09Rich Roll?

  Well, certainly to ponder the viability of printing organs or just the rudimentary implications of VR headsets on medical students who could put themselves in the position of performing cutting-edge surgeries that they wouldn't be able to bear witness to, like all of the learning tools that are now available, certainly, and the sensory tech that would allow us to have interventions at a very early phase, like, these are all fantastic things. But then I read this idea about bringing the woolly mammoth back to-

• 1:06:42Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, I love it.

• 1:06:44Rich Roll?

  And I'm like, all right, well, this is right out of the script of any bad sci-fi movie idea of humans gone wrong.

• 1:06:54Peter Diamandis?

  Or is it? So, we have caused huge extinction events of our own. And is it bad to bring back an extinct species? Not all. We can stop short of the T. rexes and the Velociraptors, but the woolly mammoth, the saber-toothed tiger, the dodo, whatever it is. Interestingly enough, I'm an investor and an advisor to Colossal, the company, full disclosure, that's doing that. Ben Lam's a brilliant CEO. It's backed by George Church. It's been one of his pet projects. And also bringing back extinct plants that are important for our environment.

• 1:07:36Peter Diamandis?

  So, I think the tech isn't bad. It's the use of the tech that can go wrong. And so, do we have the wisdom to be able to do that?

• 1:07:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's a broader conversation around the distinction between knowledge and wisdom.

• 1:07:54Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 1:07:55Rich Roll?

  And I think historically, humanity has told us that we're pretty good at knowledge and maybe not so good at wisdom all the time.

• 1:08:02Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. You know, it's interesting, I had an interesting thought recently I'll share with you. If you asked, what is the definition of wisdom? I think I would posit, and tell me what you think, that wisdom is having enough experience, having seen things enough, to be able to see unintended consequences and to make a decision based upon better judgment. Would you? Is that fair?

• 1:08:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think that's fair.

• 1:08:30Peter Diamandis?

  So if that's true, I think one of the biggest opportunities for increasing wisdom is going to be AI simulations. Because you can imagine building out AI systems that can try millions or billions of variants of a situation. Because simulations are getting so much better. We can talk about living in a simulation if you want, but the idea that an AI can give us views towards unintended consequences that we might not be able to fathom in our own minds.

• 1:09:03Rich Roll?

  What's your take on AI reaching its own escape velocity and becoming self-aware and self-improving? Extending beyond the controllable black box?

• 1:09:16Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, so I think it, I don't have any question that it will happen. Our brains are neural nets, right? Our brains, and we are understanding more and more and more, and we're building chipsets that look and feel like the neural nets of a brain. And we're seeing all the progress. This last five years has been this massive increase in AI. And that's a result of more computation and more data. And we've got companies like OpenAI that's produced GPT-3 and now GPT-4 and DeepMind, which is part of Alphabet, and they're moving at a prodigious rate. Ray Kurzweil's prediction, to go back to his predictions, are that we'll see human-level

• 1:10:01Peter Diamandis?

  AI by 2029, and he's still sticking with it. And that means the next year it will be superhuman. So the question is, what do you do at that point? And one of the ideas that I'm enamored with and Elon is funding is we're going to merge humanity with it. And this is the whole realm of brain-computer interface that we're gonna, you know, our brains have 100 billion neurons, 100 trillion synaptic connections that shape everything you hear. But our brains are limited in their capacity. You can't grow the brain any bigger, otherwise you can get through the birth canal.

• 1:10:42Peter Diamandis?

  And in fact, what our brain ended up doing to increase the neocortex, the upper layers, it started creating these folds that you see to increase the surface area. So when we use our phones and we want to do a complicated, you know, image analysis or voice analysis, that computation doesn't happen on the phone. It hap-- the phone gathers the data from the camera, the speakers and so forth, and it sends the data to the edge of the cloud on a 4G or 5G network. And the processing gets done there and then the answer comes back to your phone. So what does that look like? For a human brain, imagine if you could think, like, ask the question,

• 1:11:26Peter Diamandis?

  "What's the GDP of Ghana?", right? And have the data from that question transmitted to the cloud and Google by thinking and get the answer back. So that technology is, we're there. It's the next few years. You know, there's Neuralink, which is Elon's company. I'm an advisor in a company called Paradromics and an investor and advisor in another company called Open Water. All of these are brain-computer interface companies. And Ray's prediction, again, because there are a few things that he's put out there, is that by the early to mid 2030s, we're going to have high bandwidth brain-computer interface. Again, can't slow it down.

• 1:12:11Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:12:12Peter Diamandis?

  What do you do with it?

• 1:12:13Rich Roll?

  And where's the, you know, the wisdom-based star-chamber for all of this?

• 1:12:19Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:20Rich Roll?

  Like, that's my concern.

• 1:12:21Peter Diamandis?

  I get it. I understand.

• 1:12:22Rich Roll?

  It is, it is, I mean, it's fascinating to think about. It's certainly, you know, maturing to the point of becoming, you know, a conceptual reality. And it, it makes you wonder whether or not humanity exists like on this, this, you know, evolutionary path to give birth to this greater life form.

• 1:12:47Peter Diamandis?

  I fundamentally believe that.

• 1:12:49Rich Roll?

  In the sort of chrysalis of caterpillar to butterfly.

• 1:12:51Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:52Rich Roll?

  And what does, what does that mean for humanity? Right? And where does, where does, where does humanity's hubris sit in all of this? In thinking that this is beneficial at best and at worst innocuous?

• 1:13:07Peter Diamandis?

  Do you want to go there? My last chapter of my last book was on that topic.

• 1:13:10Rich Roll?

  I know. And again, ever the optimist.

• 1:13:13Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. So I think that this notion of brain-computer interface is going to be the transition point for our metamorphosis, our transformation. If you look back at the history of life on this planet, you know, our planet was formed four and a half billion years ago, about half a billion years after that, the earliest life forms on this planet came into existence are called prokaryotic cells. They were very simple bags of cytoplasm with free-floating DNA in them. About a half a billion to a billion years after that, give or take, those single-cell prokaryotic life forms evolved into eukaryotic life forms.

• 1:13:53Rich Roll?

  All seeded, of course, by aliens.

• 1:13:55Peter Diamandis?

  No, I'm not going to go there.

• 1:13:56Rich Roll?

  No, I know.

• 1:13:57Peter Diamandis?

  But these eukaryotic life forms effectively were these early life forms with incorporated technology into them. So the eukaryotic life forms had ingested what we call now mitochondria, which were energy plants. They were other bacteria that had been able to do oxidative energy production. And so they ingested that as a power plant inside of the cell. Then endoplasmic reticulum for creating proteins and Golgi apparatus and, more importantly, a nuclear membrane and chromosomal structures.

• 1:14:39Peter Diamandis?

  And so we went from a simple life form to a more complicated, single-cell life form with technology as part of it. The next phase, a billion years later, was to go from single-cell to multicellular life forms, where these cells would come together collaboratively and work together, eventually forming you and me. We have 40 trillion cells in our body, give or take. We're not a single life form, we're a collaboration of 40 trillion cells. And so when I think about that, I think about the analogies today, that we as humans are the prokaryotic life, the very simple individual. And we're in the midst of incorporating technology into ourselves, right?

• 1:15:24Peter Diamandis?

  Like going from prokaryotic to eukaryotic life, where, you know, these mobile phones are part of us, it's my memory bank is here and such, and as we start to connect. And if, Rich, I have a BCI connection, and you do as well, and I can share thoughts with you, right? It's a level of connection and intimacy, like watching, I can watch the sun rising in Tokyo through the eyes of somebody. There's a level of connectedness that I think is extraordinary, and just like you wouldn't take a knife and stab your arm, because it's you. Imagine a world in which we're so connected that I want you to succeed as much as you possibly can, because your success is my success, right?

• 1:16:09Peter Diamandis?

  That level of a transformation. So I call that a meta-intelligence level. Again, this is best done with a glass of wine or a scotch, but, I mean, there's some interesting directions ahead.

• 1:16:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, I hope it would move in that direction. I mean, I, you know, my sense is that the early days of the internet, there was a similar conversation around how connectivity would breed empathy and bring us closer together. But, you know, I don't have to tell you, all you gotta do is scroll on Twitter and realize that, you know, that, that sort of semi-utopian notion has not really been delivered upon.

• 1:16:46Peter Diamandis?

  But it has delivered on a multitude of other benefits, right?

• 1:16:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah, of education. Of course, I would concede that, yeah. And I want to talk, and let's, so let's talk about education, because I think you have some really interesting thoughts around that. And that's an area where, you know, I think most people agree, we're in, we're in dire need of a re-imagination. And we now have at our behest, these incredibly powerful technological tools that I think really have so many beneficial applications.

• 1:17:19Peter Diamandis?

  There are two industries I want to help topple: healthcare and education. Both of them are are just in extremis. Both of them are doing us a disservice. And both can be reinvented. AI is going to be at the core of both. You know, when you think about that, Google for the wealthiest child on the planet and the poorest child on the planet is identical. Right? You know, Larry Page's son has access to the same Google that my son has.

• 1:17:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah, if if everybody has a tablet, then they can tap into what's available.

• 1:17:55Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, and the cost of tablets have dropped below forty bucks using Android devices and such. So it is, and there will be a point at which, you know, I can imagine Amazon or Facebook giving every kid a tablet to have access to eventual buying power from that that child. So we're we're getting to global bandwidth connectivity and devices are eventually demonetizing to zero.

• 1:18:19Rich Roll?

  The overall structure of education being what it is right now, which is really a legacy of the outset of the industrial revolution, and we really have not iterated upon that in any meaningful way since.

• 1:18:30Peter Diamandis?

  Agreed, agreed. What I was saying was Google is the same. It's complete democratization and demonetization. And I think we're going to reach a point, I'm sure we'll reach a point, where the best healthcare is going to be AI-enabled, which will be accessible to the poorest and the wealthiest. And it will be, the same education will be AI-enabled, where an AI knows your child's favorite sports star, movie star, are they an auditory listener or visual learner, and be able to create a personalized level of education for that individual. Now, we're going to need to differentiate between cognitive learning

• 1:19:12Peter Diamandis?

  and social learning, right? But where we're going with Web three and the ability for AI to deliver, I mean, my, I have two ten and a half year old boys, and they love Roblox, right? It's like their religion. And they would play Roblox almost all the time if given, given permission. And it's sad that education isn't like that.

• 1:19:40Peter Diamandis?

  Why don't we have educational games, right? And when you're in school, you start with a score of 100%. And every time you get something wrong, your score goes down. In the gaming world, you start with zero. And every time you get something right, your score goes up. Why doesn't that exist? Why can't we, we connect to the game mechanics of the human brain to do that? And I think we can.

• 1:20:04Rich Roll?

  Well, it's also architected around rote memorization of, of facts and testing.

• 1:20:11Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 1:20:11Rich Roll?

  Which is ludicrous.

• 1:20:13Peter Diamandis?

  Yes. I mean, it's industrial, as you said, it's all supporting the creation of workers from the Industrial Revolution. And that's what we needed. We needed people who followed instructions. The bell would ring in the classroom. You know, you're on your production line. You go to the next place to stuff your brain with something. And I think we need to reinvent. For me, it's reinventing education around passion driven. It's like, what is your passion and your purpose? I love the Mark Twain quote, there are two important days in your life. The day that you're born and the day that you find out why. Right? So helping kids first find out why. And then how to structure an argument? How to provide a compelling point of view? And how to lead? How to have grit? Right?

• 1:20:58Rich Roll?

  Perseverance, grit, curiosity.

• 1:21:00Peter Diamandis?

  Curiosity, fundamental, asking great questions.

• 1:21:02Rich Roll?

  All of these things, I think, like, you know, you look at a young person and when they're self-directed, enthusiastic, curious, and, and already have a sense of, you know, what lights them up, like, that kid's gonna be fine.

• 1:21:17Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, exactly.

• 1:21:19Rich Roll?

  But not all kids are wired that way or are not in environments or circumstances that lend themselves towards the development of those soft skills. Right? I mean, you're somebody who at a very early age, you had this complete obsession with space.

• 1:21:33Peter Diamandis?

  I was lucky, Apollo.

• 1:21:35Rich Roll?

  That is, on some level, that is luck, right?

• 1:21:37Peter Diamandis?

  It is luck.

• 1:21:37Rich Roll?

  Not everybody gets struck with something that they can carry through their entire life.

• 1:21:42Peter Diamandis?

  Yes. Yeah, no, I agree with you. It was luck. It was Apollo showed me what was possible. And then, as I like to say, that scientific documentary Star Trek showed me where things were going.

• 1:21:51Rich Roll?

  You and me both, I love that.

• 1:21:52Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. And it lit me up.

• 1:21:54Rich Roll?

  I went to Star Trek conventions when I was.

• 1:21:56Peter Diamandis?

  I love it. And yeah, so how do you help kids experience enough to find their true passion that becomes a purpose and then they learn to fulfill those desires?

• 1:22:11Rich Roll?

  So in the case of your own kids and being a dad, a parent, I mean, are your kids in traditional school? Are they homeschool? Like, how are you injecting their lives with all of these ideas that you're passionate about?

• 1:22:27Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I, so they're in a traditional private school. And it was interesting, we only found one school that we liked. And I was like, okay, if they don't get in, you know, it's twin white Caucasian boys, and the probability of getting in was relatively low. It was like, I'm gonna start a school if I can't get them in. And they did get in, and I still am thinking about starting a school.

• 1:22:56Rich Roll?

  Doesn't Elon have, does he still have that at Astra School?

• 1:23:00Peter Diamandis?

  So I went to go, I went to go and visit his school, and it was a sort of like a third through eighth grade. And then when his kids ended up graduating, he stopped it. It was on the campus of SpaceX. And it was fantastic, and I love what they were doing. So for example, one of the things that the head of the school, who was a brilliant guy, did is he created these interesting experiments. It's okay, here's a town, and it's on the edge of a lake, and the town has a factory, and all of the employees are either employed by the factory, or they're fishermen in the

• 1:23:42Peter Diamandis?

  lake, and the fish feed the town, and we're gonna create representation in our school of the factory, the government, and the public. And all of a sudden, one day, it's found out that the factory is polluting and killing the fish in the lake. Play different roles and play it out, right? So it's that kind of thinking, that kind of debate and discussion, critical thinking, that I think is so important.

• 1:24:07Rich Roll?

  Yeah. My sense is, and this is just my own and of one experience, is that at least in Los Angeles, there's plenty of kind of interesting experiments in education for kids at the earlier stages, like in the younger grades. But at some point, these things all kind of fall apart once the kids are 12, 14, 15 year old. And there aren't, there aren't any schools that carry it through the conclusion of high school. And maybe that's because parents get scared, or they, you know, they want to make sure, well, everyone else is doing it this way. Like, this is too radical. And they freak out. While at the same time, we are seeing an explosion in homeschooling.

• 1:24:46Peter Diamandis?

  Yep. I agree. And COVID definitely was, was an interesting situation.

• 1:24:52Rich Roll?

  Well, I mean, everybody on Zoom is a disaster.

• 1:24:54Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, total disaster, right? You know, one of the big questions then is, is college going to be a thing in a decade? You know, I think, I grew up a lot in college socially, right? You know, had my sufficient amount of being picked on and such. And I learned how to defend myself mentally. And, and, and got onto my own when you're outside. So that's really important, that those years of 18 to 24, thereabouts. But I think beyond that, the freedom to go and, and learn. But I don't use anything I learned in college. Do you?

• 1:25:30Rich Roll?

  No.

• 1:25:30Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:31Rich Roll?

  I mean, we grew up in a time where if you wanted to be successful in the world, there just, you had to go to, you had to go to college and possibly grad school. I don't think that that is the case today. Certainly, for the reasons you stated, I think it's a wonderful experience to have. But it's not necessarily for everybody now. And nor should it be.

• 1:25:50Peter Diamandis?

  I think ultimately, college is a shorthand. Oh, that person went to Princeton. That person went to Stanford. Oh, they're smart.

• 1:25:59Rich Roll?

  It's a social validation stamp.

• 1:26:00Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. But there are other ways. I mean, some of the stuff that Peter Thiel was doing, like I'll pay you to drop out of college. I remember Elon having a hackathon and tweeting out that, I don't care if you graduated high school or not, if you're a great programmer, I'll hire you. And I think that's going to be an interesting direction of can you find your passion? And then can you partner with the technology that helps you develop your passion? Right, and then do what you love to do, because a lot of people get a job not because it's their passion, it's because that's how they get food on the table, or you know, get their clothing for their family.

• 1:26:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, passion is an indulgence for most people. But with respect to your own kids, like, how are you, outside of the formal schooling construct, you know, trying to help them, you know, discover their passion, cultivate curiosity, develop grit and perseverance?

• 1:26:58Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, I say publicly, and I've written, you know, a few blogs on the subject, that there are three things I want for them, that are, it's not about AI, robotics, or any of those things, it's, I want them to find their passion, I want them to learn to ask great questions, and I want them to develop grit, perseverance, I think those are the three most, and then to be great friends, since they're fraternal twins. And passion is a matter of just exposing them to as much stuff as possible. And, you know, I had kids when I was 50, and so I'm lucky in that I can, like, you know, nope, not going there to work today, I'm gonna go and do this. It's not possible for everybody, but I have an unlimited budget for books for the, for

• 1:27:40Peter Diamandis?

  the kids, it's like, whatever book you want to buy, 100%, just ask me, you know, Amazon will deliver it tomorrow. Asking great questions has become sort of a joke, because every day I would drop them off at school, I would say, "Ask great questions today, what questions did you ask today?" And it became sort of an annoyance. And then perseverance and grit, we've sort of created a family motto that the kids have developed, that we don't give up.

• 1:28:04Rich Roll?

  Right. And with the advent of AI and machine learning and all of that, obviously, we're ushering in this era of automation, where so many jobs are going to become obsolete, like, how do you think about their future and where you would direct your kids to, you know, not, not be, you know, a victim of, you know, this new world order that, you know, is soon to be?

• 1:28:30Peter Diamandis?

  It's a fascinating question, so, one realization is, technology's constantly changing. But a lot of the problems are not. And so can you become an expert in a problem? And really understand it and then be in a position to apply whatever the technology de jour is to that problem? I think there's some real truth in that element. Um, you know, folks who are have kids in a high school today or college, you know, biotech and AI are the two fields that for the time being are going to be employing people. And it's like, get that degree and you've got a job instantly. And then ultimately, we are demonetizing living. And the question is, are we going to separate

• 1:29:15Peter Diamandis?

  working for income and working for fun? Right? So, um, there's in the, in the web three world, there's a, a platform called Axie Infinity. I don't know if you've ever heard of it. So it's a game, uh, and that's called a play to earn. So people who play the game are making money. And in parts of Asia, in Vietnam, Thailand and so forth, people are earning their living playing this game Axie Infinity. And, you know, I'm not going to say I, I understand it or I fully believe it. You have to buy into it. And then as you're playing the game, you're developing your characters

• 1:29:58Peter Diamandis?

  and you're selling them to other people who are, want to enter the game and so forth. So there's, whether it's a Ponzi scheme or not, but there is, uh, the tokenization of our world is going to change, uh, how and where we earn our living.

• 1:30:14Rich Roll?

  It's so strange. I mean, that's a larger conversation about the hearkening of the metaverse. And when I look at what's happening with the tokenization and the NFT world, like this is just an initial baby step into

• 1:30:28Peter Diamandis?

  It's a baby step.

• 1:30:29Rich Roll?

  Us, this economy that will exist in the virtual space and our relationship, you know, to our, between our real lives and the lives that will transpire there. And like, maybe I'm just too old, but like, you're again, the optimist here. And I've, I've tried so hard to, to learn about, you know, aspects of that. And I, I really struggle.

• 1:30:50Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. Oh, and I think it's the only way to learn is by doing and playing and experiencing.

• 1:30:58Peter Diamandis?

  And so I'm trying to do that as much as I can and it's it is fascinating. I can see enough promise over the horizon. You know, I'm in Bitcoin and Ethereum. I've not bought a single NFT. I'm still not a believer, even though my friends have made, you know, millions of dollars in the world. It's like, no, just not there. I believe NFTs are going to be important for a number of business reasons. Just not there on the board apes yet. But the web three, where web two was a web of information exchange and web three is going to be a value exchange, where I can be transmitting money to you or transmitting ownership of things to you instantly is massive.

• 1:31:43Peter Diamandis?

  You know, we, it's 100 times, maybe a thousandfold more massive than the current web is today.

• 1:31:51Rich Roll?

  Well, the idea of smart contracts and just the ease with which, you know, we're going to be able to kind of conduct business and create incentives, et cetera, all the way down the line with that, I think is really interesting.

• 1:32:05Peter Diamandis?

  It's an amazing time. And then you start to realize the kinds of things you can monetize. So a few companies I know about, if you sequence your genome and if you give them access to your genome to be used in different product developments and so forth, you can earn money from it and such. If that company, if your genome is used for creating a discovery and so forth.

• 1:32:30Rich Roll?

  My head's going to explode.

• 1:32:31Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I mean, honestly, it's, it's, the only constant is change and the speed of change is increasing. Now, I am the optimist and I feel like optimism is warranted over and over and over again over the last 50 years. And our tools, you know, I define an entrepreneur as someone who finds a juicy problem and fixes it, right? That's what, you know, real entrepreneurs are doing well. And I also believe that the world's biggest problems are the world's biggest business opportunities, right? And what I teach at Singularity University and Abundance 360 is, when I become a billionaire, help a billion people, right? It's those kinds of mantras

• 1:33:14Peter Diamandis?

  and mindsets that are like, where can I go solve this problem? What problem can I go solve there?

• 1:33:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and the mindset piece, I think that's really important, and maybe this is the last thing that we can cover here. You know, when I look at the breadth of your work, you're somebody who has never been afraid to tackle big problems and really set, you know, what most would assume to be just, you know, outlandish, audacious goals. So it's that relationship, there's a certain kind of like, relationship to reality that you have and possibility. Like, why, you know, why advocate for incremental change when you can say, we're gonna do X, Y, or Z that nobody had ever thought of? So, talk to me a little bit about

• 1:33:58Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, happily.

• 1:34:00Rich Roll?

  your thinking around that?

• 1:34:01Peter Diamandis?

  So I think mindset is the single most important thing that anyone can take out of this conversation today, in addition to health. I got religion on mindset over the course of the last decade, and I've made it the focus. So I mentor thousands of entrepreneurs through an abundance digital, and I run a CEO executive program year-round called Abundance 360, which is part of Singularity University. And I've focused the entire program around mindset. And there are four mindsets that I focus on. An abundance mindset, an exponential mindset, a moonshot mindset, and a longevity mindset. There's gratitude mindsets and curiosity

• 1:34:42Peter Diamandis?

  mindsets. We'll come back to the primaries. If I were to ask you, what made Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mahatma Gandhi, whoever it might be, successful? Was it the money they had? Was it the relationships they had? Was it the tech they had? Or was it their mindset? I would posit that mindset is the most important out of those things. If you took away everything from them, but they maintained their mindset, they would regain some portion of it. And so if that's true, if mindset is that important, then where are we proactively developing and honing our mindsets? Because most of us, including me, until, you know, this last decade,

• 1:35:27Peter Diamandis?

  have been getting our mindsets from our parents, our schools, God forbid, the stuff we watch on TV. And instead of like proactively honing it. And if you don't mind, let me hit on those four mindsets. Absolutely. So abundance mindset is something I got that out of Singularity University, and it got me to write my first book, Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think. And it was the realization that, oh my God, we are moving from scarcity, which is we're genetically dialed into scarcity. We are, we have, we have in our brains, in our genome, we have a scarcity mindset because it was where we evolved.

• 1:36:09Peter Diamandis?

  But technology is a force that turns whatever used to be scarce into abundance over and over and over again. Case in point, we used to go and kill whales to get whale oil to light our nights, right, then we ravaged mountainsides for coal, then we drilled kilometers in the ocean floor. And now, photovoltaics, we talked about fusion, there's a squanderable abundance of energy coming. So tech moved it from scarcity to abundance. We have more capital, year on year on year, than any time ever. So we're going to hit $100 trillion on our global economy this year. We've hit the most number of unicorns ever. The amount of venture capital invested in 2017 beat 2016,

• 1:36:49Peter Diamandis?

  2018 beat 2017, even in a, and on and on and on, even through the pandemic. This 2021, we doubled the amount of venture capital than in 2020, which doubled 2019. Okay, let's go on. This past year, what would you think of as more scarce? Than a perfect diamond, a four-carat, five-carat, ten-carat diamond. Pandora, the largest jeweler on the planet, this past year, said, "We're gonna stop selling conflict diamonds, or mined diamonds that have social issues, and we're only gonna produce manufactured diamonds." And so, all of a sudden, diamonds went from being scarce to perfect diamonds, eight, ten, twenty-carat diamonds,

• 1:37:31Peter Diamandis?

  becoming abundant. It's the cost of electricity, methane, and water. And a friend of mine at a company called The Diamond Foundry manufactures whatever gem you want. Do you want flaws and perfections? You can do that. And so, this is an abundance mindset, which I'll cap that one off in the following way. If you got a pie, and all of a sudden, twice as many people show up for dinner, in a scarcity mindset, you're like, "Ah, damn, I gotta slice the slices thinner and thinner and thinner." In an abundance mindset, so it's bullshit. We're gonna bake more pies. Right? That's an abundance mindset. Every year, it's giving us more and more opportunities, which has been fundamentally the case. Your competition, forget about them. There's more opportunities. Let's go in that direction.

• 1:38:17Peter Diamandis?

  An exponential mindset is just the notion that we're linear thinkers. You know, take thirty linear steps, you're thirty meters away. But our tech world is growing exponentially. Thirty doublings, one, two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two. In thirty doublings, you're a billion meters away. You've gone around the planet twenty-six times. And so, in an exponential mindset, it's important to be able to see where the technologies are going and how they're converging. And so, at A360, that I work people through the abundance mindset, give the examples of increasing abundance across almost every single area, exponential mindsets, and what the implications are. A moonshot mindset

• 1:39:01Peter Diamandis?

  is the notion that most of the world would love ten percent. Would really love a ten percent improvement in revenues, ten percent more customers. And that's a great stretch goal. In a moonshot mindset, you're saying, "No, no, no. I don't want ten percent. I wanna go ten times bigger, a thousand percent bigger." And when you do that, you've got to let go of all your preconceived notions. The astro teller, who's the captain of moon shots at Alphabet, a brilliant guy, a friend who I care about greatly, gives an example that says, if you're a car company and your car is doing 50 miles per gallon and you want to get to 55, you can do that. You can

• 1:39:46Peter Diamandis?

  lightweight the car, get better aerodynamics. But if you want to go from 50 to 500, you've got to start with a clean sheet of paper and reinvent the car. And so, the ability to take these moon shots are here because of these exponential technologies. And when I'm teaching the CEOs that I coach, it's like, you want to keep 95% of your company doing 10%. They're generating the engine, right, that keeps you alive. And you don't want them taking moon shots. But you want to find that small team, that moonshot team,

• 1:40:25Peter Diamandis?

  and take them away from the main company. And you want to say to them, listen, I don't want you taking 10%. If I see you doing 10% activities, you're fired. I want you trying crazy ideas that have the potential to reinvent our business, right? The day before something is really a breakthrough, it's a crazy idea. And most companies aren't trying crazy ideas, and then they're stuck in incrementalism.

• 1:40:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah, the idea of creating a skunk works.

• 1:40:49Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, it's a skunk works.

• 1:40:50Rich Roll?

  Because every company, when it reaches a certain scale, falls prey to its own bureaucracy and, you know, soon becomes a dinosaur, short of having that level of innovation within.

• 1:41:03Peter Diamandis?

  Absolutely. There are very few 100-year-old companies. Yeah. The final mindset that I'm enamored with, and it's what gave birth to this book, Life Force, to bring it back, is the longevity mindset. And, you know, you can will yourself to death, and you can will yourself to live longer if you have something to live for, and if you believe you have the ability to live out of pain and have the cognition, the aesthetics, the mobility. And so a longevity mindset for me is helping people see where this field is going. One of the things I did, Rich, was I built over the last year an AI engine that searches

• 1:41:48Peter Diamandis?

  the global news, journals, tweets, magazines, newspapers, and it finds longevity and health tech breakthroughs. And it scans it for any dystopian and it rates it on a quality article and I get a digest every day, it uses GPT-3, uses the OpenAI's AI engine, to give me a summary paragraph about 15 different breakthroughs per day. And so it's my longevity mindset. I'm seeing what's going on in all of these different fields and I have zero question about reaching longevity escape velocity. And you can try it, as can everyone else, it's free, it's longevityinsider.org.

• 1:42:33Peter Diamandis?

  And at the end of the day, I get this news that gives me tremendous hope. And because of that, I'm willing to change my diet, sleep longer, you know, do intermittent fasting.

• 1:42:49Rich Roll?

  Right. It's almost, we're the, we're the last generation, right, who are like butting right up against the edge of whether we're making it across the transom or not.

• 1:42:59Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:00Rich Roll?

  Right? Which is interesting. Well, it was a pleasure talking to you.

• 1:43:04Peter Diamandis?

  A lot of fun conversations.

• 1:43:05Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I really appreciate it. I hope that, you know, the utopian version of all the things that you are speaking about comes to fruition. And if Skynet should befall us, I'm going to call you up.

• 1:43:18Peter Diamandis?

  All right. I'll be, I'll be watching for it.

• 1:43:21Rich Roll?

  And I'd love to have you back whenever, whenever you want to talk about space and all these other things that you're into because it's super fascinating. But I appreciate you coming here today. The book is Life Force, available wherever you buy books, a great primer to read in conjunction with Dave Sinclair's fantastic book.

• 1:43:40Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 1:43:41Rich Roll?

  Lifespan. And there's a lot of stuff in there that'll blow your mind. So, thank you.

• 1:43:45Peter Diamandis?

  Thank you, Rich. Appreciate you.

• 1:43:47Rich Roll?

  Peace.

• 1:43:53Rich Roll?

  That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guests, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com, where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change, and The Plant Power Way, as well as The Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts,

• 1:44:32Rich Roll?

  on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and/or comment. Supporting the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is of course, awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, The Meal Planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo, with additional audio engineering by Cale Curtis. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis, with assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake. Portraits

• 1:45:16Rich Roll?

  by Davy Greenberg and Grayson Wilder. Graphic and social media assets courtesy of Jessica Miranda, Daniel Solis, Dan Drake, and A.J. Akpodiette. Thank you Georgia Whaley for copywriting and website management. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants.